Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday September 11, 2012 @12:09PM
from the bet-you-can-think-of-a-few-reasons dept.

jfruh writes "Apple's spent more than a decade on version 10 — or, rather, X — of its flagship operating system, with .x versions named after big cats (and many of them, it turns out, after the same big cats). Ubuntu Linux is scrambling to find ever more obscure animals to alliteratively name its versions after. And let's not even talk about Windows, whose current shipping OS is sold as Windows 7 but is really Windows NT 6.1. Why is this area of software marketing so ridiculous?"

Besides that, isn't TFA judging Windows by the exact same thing we are told NOT to judge by when it comes to Linux, aka 'Linux is just a kernel'? After all it is the kernel that is WinNT 6.1 whereas the distro (again using Linux terminology) is Windows 7.

Can't have your cake and eat it to, rules are rules and if you want people to call it Ubuntu Myopic Monkey instead of Linux then call Windows by the name and OSX by the name.

It won't work that way, because there are only a few lines of Linux kernels and hundreds of distributions.With Windows, you have a few lines of kernels too, but only a handful of distributions (a.k.a. home, professional, server, database server etc.pp.).

So yes, it's Windows NT 6.1 with the distributions Windows 7 Home and Professional and Windows 2010 Server. But look how many Linux distributions are currently shipping with Linux 3.0!

The summary, folks here and the TFA(didn't read fully!) seem to be missing the point about why the internal Windows Version is 6.1 for Windows 7. The reason is that a LOT of software, drivers and other utilities have this kind of code in them:

if(first letter of Windows Version Number) is not 6 Print 'Error, OS not compatible'

Even though the software is fully compatible with the OS(because they didn't change the driver model from Vista), the non updated software from old CDs etc. throw up this error. To get around this issue, Windows internally names it 6.1, so the offending software thinks it's on some Vista service pack. Also, this is an *internal* version number compared to Apple's and Ubuntu's OSes which are the marketing names, so I don't even see why this was brought up except as flamebait.

The reason is that Windows 7 actually is just a minor revision on Vista, and 8 is a minor revision from that. Under the hood, the big changes were between NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 (Windows NT 5), then between 2000 and Vista (Windows 6). The changes from 5.0 to 5.1 (2000 to XP) or from 6.0 to 6.1 to 6.2 (Vista, 7, and 8) were incremental in nature as far as the inner workings of the OS are concerned.

The real reason 7 felt so much faster than Vista: When they made Vista, they planned on you booting up very infrequently, so they scheduled a lot of junk to happen at boot and login, thinking that users would just 'sleep' instead of rebooting. Windows 7 (And Vista SP2) backs off a bit and does the housekeeping when you're not using the computer. Vista actually wasn't really 'slow', it's just 'irrationally busy' doing stuff with the I/O (indexing, precaching, defragmenting, etc.) while you're just trying to get to your gosh-darned desktop.

The real reason 7 felt so much faster than Vista: When they made Vista, they planned on you booting up very infrequently, so they scheduled a lot of junk to happen at boot and login, thinking that users would just 'sleep' instead of rebooting. Windows 7 (And Vista SP2) backs off a bit and does the housekeeping when you're not using the computer. Vista actually wasn't really 'slow', it's just 'irrationally busy' doing stuff with the I/O (indexing, precaching, defragmenting, etc.) while you're just trying to get to your gosh-darned desktop.

Also, the reason people had fewer compatibility problems with 7 isn't because Microsoft fixed the OS, it's because software and hardware vendors fixed their applications and drivers.

If you tried to do anything useful on Windows Vista within the first six months after it was released, you probably had a miserable experience. If you tried to do the same stuff on Windows 7 within the first six months of that OS's release, it probably worked fine. What people don't realize is that if you did a clean install o

Version numbers are entirely arbitrary. It's not like version 2 actually corresponds to the 2nd build is it...

Version numbers are a lot less arbitrary than artsy-fartsy names like "Dapper Drake" or "Mangled Melon" or whatever Ubuntu is up to today. Nobody said that version numbers match the "build", but they do match the releases.

I find it much easier to understand that CentOS 6.1 is a newer version than CentOS 6.0, for example, than trying to remember that "Killer Kangaroo" is newer than "Sloppy Sloth".

Why get upset when someone decides that OS 10 is something special, or that the first version will be 3, the second 3.1 and the third 3.14.

I find it much easier to understand that CentOS 6.1 is a newer version than CentOS 6.0, for example, than trying to remember that "Killer Kangaroo" is newer than "Sloppy Sloth".

Well, you shouldn't try to remember that, since Ubuntu names in alphabetical order, just like Android. That will roll around in some half a dozen years, but Ubuntu also has YY.MM version numbers, so you know immediately that version 08.04 is over four years old. It's better than Debian where the name is not given alphabetically, but Debian also has a version number when you need it. Geeks make the OS. Geeks like the wacko names. Deal with it.

It's not just Apple and it's not just OSes, it's everything the suitpigs come up with. Ford FIESTA? Cheetos? Why "Dawn" dish soap when most people wash dishes in the evening? TIDE detergent? SATURN cars? TWAIN and GNU? WINDOWS? iPhone and iPad and iPod and iCantstanditanymore... marketers must be insane.

No doubt, but it's not really consistent with the existing scheme (i.e. the "proper English" names of cat species) and nor does the other suggestion of "Felix Domesticux" (whether that's correct Latin or not).

Apple's animal names started as internal code names (intended to obscure what was being worked on), that leaked out. Rumor sites would talk about the upcoming project 'Puma', not really knowing much about it, and then it became apparent that this was the next version of the OS, so the same sites would continue to refer to it as 'Puma' to keep things consistent.

Repeat again with 'Jaguar', but this time Apple's marketing department noticed that people liked the name, and decided to continue using it themselves. The next code name was then chosen with marketing's involvement....

Also, for most non-techies, it is easier to remember "Tiger" than "10.4"

I'd disagree on the latter. Which came first, Debian Potatoe or Debian Sarge? Damfino (well, actually I do, but,...) However every noob knows 2005 is more recent than 2000.

Where I work, internally, its all git-flow, and our releases have really boring, yet informative, names which are basically of the format:

release/`date +%Y-%M-%d`

Like today's heroic effort would be release/2012-09-11

This date structure also helps with git-flow features, obviously you can't have two "add some bs" branches but you can have "2012-06-01-add-some-bs" and "2012-08-13-add-some-bs"

If one of my coworkers gets outta whack about last monday's release I know exactly what he's talking about, that would be release/2012-08-27 Or I can even find 2012-06-18. But "Rumbly Rumpelstiltskin v2.1D" WTF is that? thats just unprofessional.

It really doesn't matter of the non-techie knows the order of release. The non-techie simply needs to tell the tech helping them out that they have Jaunty Jackalope. Even if the non-tech mangles the name it's still more likely to communicate to the tech--in spite of the data loss--what they have. You'll dance in circles all day if you're trying to coax a version number out of them from memory.

Indeed. Apple has even decreased the amount of marketing in the last version or two that's focused on the.x portion of the name, instead choosing to replace references to it in a lot of their literature with the codename for the version. In fact, if you go to the OS X page [apple.com], you won't see a single mention of "10.8" anywhere, except for a footnote in one of the subsections where they specify what version of the OS they ran the SunSpider benchmark on.

But that causes problems too. When the old Rio Vista server gets repurposed as the second WebSense server, what do you call it? I've seen people include the OS, SQL, IIS versions (oops we upgraded it in place), the room number (moved that to our new location), physical vs virtual, etc. and within 3 years, it all worthless because it's all wrong (or wrong often enough not to be trusted).

I honestly wish that servers would be named after something like Star Wars planets or something, it actually gives them a character that you can remember instead of Win2008_IIS7_P_SantaAna (which is, of course, a Windows 2008 R2 instance running IIS 7.5 on a virtual machine in Amazon's cloud, but we can't change the name or everything will break). I would be much happier if it were just called OrdMantell.

To say nothing of the fact that the version as a number doesn't matter. The purpose of the version is to distinguish between different version of the same product so you know what's compatible, what broke, where to start debugging, etc. Most major OS releases don't even come close to being "the same product" from a user perspective, and the other factors are all issues that developers care about and end users pretty much shouldn't have to.

If they were really smart, the would release every six months. Like maybe in April and October. Then they could follow a year.month format for their releases. So 11.10 could be released October 2011, and 12.04 could be released April 2012, maybe a 12.10 in October 2012.

The animal names are code words for the project used while developing it, when the release date is still a ways away. The real version number is the release date, and very easy to remember and provides some relevant information about that Ubuntu version.

Honestly, I think all software that is regularly released should use the versioning scheme that Ubuntu uses. Windows is not released often enough for the scheme to be practical for them, people would see the numbers as being out of date, and the Service Pack

Windows, whose current shipping OS is sold as Windows 7 but is really Windows NT 6.1

This is a distinction between a brand name and a kernel version number. Why is this more absurd compared to "Precise Pangolin" for instance?

Regardless, I think you'll find names of almost any product in a sufficiently crowded marketplace become absurd as they try to differentiate themselves and also avoid stepping on any trademarked names. You see this with domain names in particular.

Naming a product to sell it in a commercial market has got nothing to do with internal release milestones, and you don't have to be a marketing expert to realize that 'Windows 11' doesn't sound especially cool, whereas 'X' or 'Wild Giraffe' both sound awesome.

Nah, that distinction goes to "Windows" which is so generic and "merely functional" that Microsoft nearly lost the trademark in a counterclaim by Linspire, wherupon Microsoft paid Linspire to shut up about it.

Operating Systems are fundamentally boring. Once you get past the fanboi-ism, they are just software that sits there on your computer. They are there to *facilitate* your work, but they don't produce anything in and of themselves.

So you have to jazz them up as much as you can, so people will take notice.

Except if the OS wasn't there, you'd have to create it. Every layer of abstraction the OS provides is another layer that app developers do not need to invent themselves. Remember DOS games that made you choose your audio card and video card? The OS is the huge base that lets you build your app pyramids.

...because convincing people to pay $200 to upgrade from Windows NT 6.0 to Windows NT 6.1 is not as easy as telling them it's a whole new version of Windows.

Also, Apple uses the big cat theme for the same reason. Tell somebody you want $30 to upgrade them from 10.7 to 10.8 and you wouldn't have much success. On the flip side, there's not enough of a difference between each version of Mac OS X to warrant each getting its own major number. They're all based on the same underlying kernel and subsystems but have new features and UI improvements as the big selling point.

DUH!!!!!!!
Version control numbers are completely beyond the need of the laymen when it comes to OS. All they care about is if its new or different from what they are running and thus why the OS has names like Win 8 or Mountain Lion.
I almost never refer to Lion as Lion except to users. To me its 10.7.# Build ##### thats all I need thats all I care about.

I thought the main reason for Windows 7 being Windows NT 6.1 was because that way they could avoid breaking driver compatibility since most of the drivers should still work between these very similar architectures.
Windows NT 6.0 - Windows Vista/Server 2008
Windows NT 6.1 - Windows 7/Server 2008 R2
Windows NT 6.2 - Windows 8/Server 2012

This is correct. MS changes the kernel major version number when they introduce major (sometimes backward-incompatible) driver-interface changes. They actually aren't always backward-incompatible; NT6.0 (Vista) would actually load most NT5.1 (XP) or even 5.0 (2000) drivers just fine... but it wasn't generally supported, and the installers would freak out at the changed major version number (this could be worked around by running in Compatibility Mode to spoof the version info, among other things). Besides, some drivers (notably network and printer drivers, which had significant interface changes) just *didn't* work correctly, if at all, with NT6.x. Windows 8 is still NT 6.2 because, although they've removed a few more of the old NT5.x driver interfaces, the 6.x drivers will still work.

Not sure about why these things get such odd names for people to use... but years ago when I still coded for a living, if we were working on something, we specifically gave it a codename which a) the marketing guys would never ever use, and b) which made it not so obvious what it was.

We used to find that if the sales guys caught whiff of something, or liked the working name, it would end up being used in customer presentations and generally cause problems as they started selling something that hadn't been released (or even coded) yet.

So project anchovy or project firkin tended to keep them away. This was done throughout development, and I believe was actually a policy.

As to why Ubuntu comes up with such odd names... that I can't even speak to. Because "Zitty Zebra" or "Punk-Rock Platypus" never seem to make sense as official names to me.

if we were working on something, we specifically gave it a codename which a) the marketing guys would never ever use, and b) which made it not so obvious what it was.

The almighty GOOG is failing me now but this explains the release of some software I was using from github with the release name "Cinco de who gives a f*ck". At least I didn't have to guess what day that was released, or what he though about having to "work" on his holiday.There's another project out there using pr0n actresses names as "release names". Come on mighty GOOG, dont you index github?

It is probably a trademark issue. The stranger the name (i.e., distinct) the easier it is to protect the name. If you named your operating system, Functional Operating System, you will have a harder time than if you had named your operating system, Big Slick.

Unique trademark-able names are fine. Giving a different fruity name to every version isn't. The developers think the universe revolves around their product and everyone will remember all their little names and applaud them for their cleverness... but they're wrong.

Only speaking for Linux here,But googling for generic issues often throws up heaps of out-of-date or otherwise unhelpful hitsFor a set of systems that move so fast (eg. 6 monthly release cycles for Ubuntu and Fedora), you need to get more taylored results

Including "Quantal", "Wheezy" or "Spherical" in your search terms is likely to pull up far more relevant results

I knew what year Windows 95 came out, and I knew Win 98 was 3 years afterwards. I know that "Prickly Penguin" is after "Jumping Jeroboa" (yes, I know those aren't real names), but I don't immediately know when each came out. And I don't have a clue which Debian toy was when.. At least with years, I know how old a given OS is.

Far more egregious than OS names is the numbering convention for the Xbox and Firefox. Xbox went from 1 to 360, presumably because Microsoft's marketing department couldn't stand to be stuck at 2 when the Playstation was already on 3. I'd like how they're going to address that one when they get to the next gen model; they'll probably go with a name instead. Firefox is currently at 15 when every update since about 4 has been incremental. I doubt they'd even have gotten to 5 by now were they following proper

OS names are like car models... it's just that OS names haven't been around as long so articles like TFA still get written.

For example, Porsche911 has been around almost fifty years (since 1963 [wikipedia.org]).
I wonder if anyone in 1973 wrote an article on "Porsche '911' - A Nonsensical Naming Standard?"
Maybe people in 2052 will still be driving "OS X" or "Windows Server 2052".

fwiw - I believe airplane manufacturers follow a similar naming convention (737, 747, Airbus, Cesna,...).
Spaceship manufacturers are still fairly new, but I bet in 2052 that SpaceX will still be building Falcons.

I run debian/stable and debian/testing.I think they were squeeze and wheezy, but I don't really care what the name is, why should I.

I know I've got the current most up to date in each tree, and that's all that really matters to me.

Some morning you'll wake up and your production boxes will have 500 packages waiting for installation and munin and nagios will be going bonkers due to pending packages because wheezy got released that night. No big deal, although I prefer that kinda stuff on my schedule not theirs.

The only problem I've had with squeeze->wheezy is the well reported ? perl sha hash issue where libdigest-sha1-perl has gone away so you get to go thru your source code and change all the use Digest::SHA1 statements to use Di